Collaborative Research: Sustained Resources: OneMineralogy - A FAIR and friendly mineralogy data ecosystem to boost data-intensive geoscience research and education

About This Grant

Minerals are essential to understanding our planet's past and guiding its sustainable future. This project builds on Mindat.org, the world's largest public database of minerals and their global distributions, which receives nearly 10 million visitors per year. With previous support from the National Science Foundation, the OpenMindat project has made mineral data more accurate and accessible for scientists and the public alike. This new phase of work, called OneMineralogy, will expand these efforts into a broader open science ecosystem. OneMineralogy aims to make mineral data and tools available to a wider range of users, including students, educators, researchers, and decision-makers. Its data, tools, and services will help them ask and answer big questions about how Earth's systems have evolved over time. The activities of OneMineralogy will strengthen science education, promote open data sharing, support mineral exploration (including critical minerals), and accelerate discoveries related to planetary science, Earth-life co-evolution, and environmental change. By fostering new partnerships and offering training opportunities, OneMineralogy will empower the next generation of scientists and ensure that mineralogical data benefit society as a whole. Scientifically, OneMineralogy will advance the frontier of data-driven geoscience by developing new data curation strategies, computational tools, and community engagement programs. It builds on the success of the NSF-funded OpenMindat project, which has already improved the quality and accessibility of over 6,000 mineral species records and data from more than 400,000 global localities. OneMineralogy will consist of three major activity clusters: (1) extending and curating data to support a wider range of geoscientific research, (2) building a data science toolbox to enable large-scale analysis of mineralogical systems, and (3) conducting workshops and outreach programs to grow the user community and build capacity. The project will integrate Mindat with other open cyberinfrastructure resources related to paleoenvironments, geomicrobiology, tectonics, and biosignatures. The enriched data and tools will provide strong support to the investigation of Earth's dynamic history through deep time. It will also provide a foundation for interpreting the growing body of mineralogical data from planetary missions to the Moon and Mars. Through these activities, OneMineralogy will create a sustained, open, and collaborative ecosystem to support transdisciplinary research and education in the Earth and planetary sciences. This award by the Geoinformatics program is co-funded by the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program, which supports projects that build understandings of practices, program elements, contexts and processes contributing to increasing students' knowledge and interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and information and communication technology (ICT) careers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.